The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915, by Jon Grinspan

We Have Been In A Similar Political Mess Before—And The Good News Is We Found Our Way Out

‎"Americans claim that we are more divided than we have been since the Civil War, but forget that the lifetime after the Civil War saw the loudest, roughest political campaigns in our history. From the 1860's through the early 1900's, presidential elections... were decided by the closest margins, and witnessed the most political violence...The nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections "won" by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations. Control of Congress rocketed back and forth, but neither party seemed capable of tackling systemic issues disrupting Americans' lives. Driving it all, a tribal partisanship captivated the public, folding racial, ethnic, and religious identities into two warring hosts." Jon Grinspan, The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy 1865-1915

As readers of the Lone Liberal Republican website and Facebook page know, the main thrust of the writing on the sites is about finding more pragmatic, consensus-oriented politics, leaving behind today's stale, zero-sum mess. Politics should be a means to good governance, not a game, or entertainment, where one side has to win and one has to lose.

Turns out we have been in a very similar over-polarized place before in our history, and we managed to work our way out of it. Reading about it has given me hope, so I want to share some of what I have learned in the belief that doing so might give others more hope too.

The two books I found of most relevance to understanding our prior history of polarization, and trying to learn from it, are a new one by Jon Grinspan, called The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy 1865-1915, and a classic by Robert H. Wiebe, The Search‎ For Order 1877-1920. Here are some of the interesting highlights from The Age of Acrimony, with some comments:

• "America's politics threatened America's promise...Complain as they might about politics, Americans couldn't look away. This is the fundamental paradox of their era--and perhaps our own. Americans bemoaned the failure of their democracy, but also joined in its worst habits with a zealous fixation."

• ‎"Americans [faced] a long crisis of popular government, self-inflicted and eventually self-cured. A political disruption that ricocheted from optimism through rage to disillusionment to boredom before reform was possible."‎

Arguably we have already been through the rage stage and are now in the disillusionment stage. Does boredom come next, then self-cure? And what can we each do to help this process along? (Part 2 of this post will discuss that.)

• "Republicans tended to support an active federal government, while Democrats denounced 'centralism,' but mostly, each side just opposed what the other side stood for...[Democrats] also attracted wealthier populations through hostility to centralized government, taxes, high tariffs and meddlesome social legislation."

This is quite a change in the make up of each party and what they stand for today. If it happened before it can happen again.‎

• "[T]he incredible changes of the nineteenth century, the social and economic revolutions that disrupted ordinary people's lives...created a cycle of rage, a self-perpetuating bad mood that...pushed citizens farther into partisanship while undermining their faith in democracy."

• "[T]he question [was] whether this democracy could be reformed. And then it was...Americans managed to peacefully calm the heated politics of the late nineteenth century. An incredible transformation of American politics took place around 1900, reconfiguring a public, partisan passionate system into a more private, independent, restrained one...[T]he social reforms of the Progressive Era--the child labor laws and pure food acts and vaccination campaigns that made modern life liveable--were only possible because a generation first quieted their politics."‎

• ‎"[In the election of 1884,] a small group of very vocal Republicans...squeaky clean reformers...announced that they would rather vote for a Democrat than support Blaine's corruption. The press mocked them as 'Mugawumps'...self-important bigmouths. Theirs was the first prominent break in the ironclad partisanship that had stifled American democracy for a generation...[The Democratic candidate was Grover Cleveland.] There was something about his bland sturdiness that appealed to voters who wanted quiet politics for once...[Grover Cleveland was elected, the first Democratic president since 1856.]The vote was inconceivably close...Barely one thousand men in New York State decided the race. There were probably one thousand Manhattan Mugawumps who switched‎ from the Republicans to the Democrats in 1884, showing that independent bolters could determine the course of the nation."‎

Similarly today, half a dozen Liberal Republicans in Congress could be the fulcrum on which a more pragmatic, consensus-oriented politics could pivot. Just look at the power Senators Manchin, Sinema, Murkowski and Collins (and the late Senator McCain) have had with government so evenly divided. And Biden was elected to quiet our post-Trump politics, but chose a more partisan, activist path…and look how that is turning out.

•"After Steffens laid out the corruption of seven cities, his conclusion pointed straight at readers in their easy chairs. The simple truth, Steffens wrote, was that politicians were expert readers of public demands, and the public had not demanded good government. Instead, for decades they had been driven by outrage, alternating between political parties, throwing out one set of bums, then the other. Steffens asked, 'Do we Americans really want good government? Do we know It when we see it?'...Everyone knew that Americans were capable of public anger, Steffens wrote, but whether they could 'go forth singly also, and, without passion, with nothing but mild approval and dull duty to impel us, vote intelligently to sustain a fairly good municipal government, remains to be shown.'"

• "Individually, Americans were good sober citizens, but the nation's political culture had spent decades intoxicating itself. The political scientist James T. Young...[warned] that 'the consumer of political alcohol finds that his system is less and less exhilarated by the accustomed stimulant.' By 1900 a lifetime of political outrage was starting to taste like weak whiskey."

• "[T]hey fought to replace partisan tribalism with political individualism. It may seem odd that this individualism emerged during the Progressive Era, a moment of greater acknowledgment of the social influences on life...In public life a larger cultural shift took place. The tribal, nearly biological view of partisanship, and the demonization of the rival party...weakened."

• "What really had made the difference: a small chunk of the electorate--5 to 10 percent--who remade their minds each election...After decades of casting about for a viable third party, nonpartisanship proved to be the better alternative. Let the two parties have their power, but let some portion of voters toggle back and forth between them each election."

• "[America could not govern itself.] America had freed it's slaves. It had enfranchised it's laboring classes. It had built a massive industrial economy. And yet political life felt perpetually unsettled...Politics was strangling governance."

Politics is certainly strangling governance today.

More soon, including suggestions for how each of us as individuals can contribute to quieting our politics to a more pragmatic, consensus-oriented space. In the meantime, please share any ideas you have for achieving this. And I highly recommend The Age of Acrimony.

Thanks and be well